How Home-Start used BrandStencil to introduce their rebrand

Challenges

Home-Start were investing in a rebrand to increase fundraising and attract volunteers. They needed the local charities to get on-board with the new brand quickly and smoothly to maximise the impact of the new brand.

Brand management had always been troublesome for them in the past, especially with so many people nationwide with different IT skills and print facilities. With the rebrand it was an opportunity for them to ensure brand governance was easier for the communications team going forwards.

This resulted in wanting to find a future-proof platform that they could launch with the new brand and continue to evolve as the organisation grew.

Solutions

We created Home-Start UK a custom-branded BrandStencil platform with just the right amount of templates to encourage people to engage with the new brand. This included poster templates, letterheads, DL leaflet templates and business cards; all of which were highly requested prior to the rebrand. We also created separate asset and image libraries so they could centrally store important assets (such as brand guidelines) and allow users to search and download hi-res images.

The platform was linked to from their intranet, seamlessly becoming a part of the rebrand launch.

The importance of onboarding

We knew from the first meeting that onboarding would be extremely important so as part of our set up we worked with the communications team to carve out a clear onboarding process.

This included when to send out the communicational updates, any user testing to undergo, where BrandStencil should sit in their intranet and also a workshop we delivered to show a small team how BrandStencil should be managed.

Following on from this Home-Start UK have continued to create their own set of help videos on their intranet which have proved immensely popular.

The shape of design

Home-Start UK asked us to help them with the design of the artwork for the templates. We introduced them to our design partners 05 Creative who have worked with us on a number of template design projects.

Using the foundation shapes and colours developed by Spencer Dubois (the rebrand partners) they created flexible, simple templates . When a colour is selected the shapes also updated, creating consistent but variable designs.

Team-based approvals

As Home-Start UK has multiple teams and volunteers nationwide there were still some communications that did require brand management. We introduced team-based approval: the ability to add users into teams and assign an approval contact for each team. This lessened the load on the communications team and ensured the individual teams felt empowered.